We all are experiencing more and more downtimes of the website. Although we got used to the sporadic downtimes in the past we face a whole new quality of problems. Each 2nd posted text gets a 500 in return, most of the long threads are no longer visible at all and the forum index, if loaded at all, is either outdated or takes two cups of coffee to load.Therefore i ask the admin team in this thread to change the board software. If need be there are dozens of users who will help you in migrating this to any other software that is faster and more stable than this ages old Yabb (As a paleontologist i feel like making a u/th dating of the board to see if the version came before or after the split up of )Pangaea..).

I know there is the problem with the links on other pages, but who says all will be lost? There are ways to preserve this. It might not work right from the start but it will do sooner or later, and i guess it will be sooner since the community is as willing to sacrifice time for it as it wants a stable software

Now this is a cheap trick, but i would like to ask the users to make this some sort of list of signs by simply adding a post to say they support a change...

Believe me, Mike, I calculated the odds of this succeeding against the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid[ch8230] and I went ahead

Agree absolutely. Somebody suggested just abandoning this one, locking new posts and leaving as a read only board for google to find. Nice easy solution, since most threads only have a lifespan of a day or two. Meanwhile we start out afresh.....

I assume the problem must somehow be with costs or cash flow. Who can we send money to to help make it better? A member supported site might at least keep the electric bill/server bill from being the problem.

Tis not only the forum, also the playground is affected by the "Error 500" mess. We need a good solution for all of this. One solution to rule them all.

Let the community take care of it. We write the posts anyway ;-)

As this may drift into the direction of system architecture, may I suggest to split the forum from the blog/playground server. I suppose the load on the blog/playground is rather minimal, so it could run on a feeble virtual server of its own. Even if the forum should get down for some reason, at least the main entry page would still be there. Most of the software downloads have been shifted to google anyway. This can still be improved by adding bittorrent to the equation. Running a dedicated tracker is easy enough, as I've shown.

The forum gets all the traffic, so it needs a more rugged machine. A DNS entry for 'forum.arduino.cc' already exists, so it should be simple to make that point to a new server for hosting a speedy forum.

Just for reference:

A virtual server package with 2GB of exclusive RAM (+4GB dynamically), 40GB disk space, 5TB of included traffic, full root access, 24/7 phone support, running on an 8 core dell poweredge server, costs about 19.99? per month (CentOS 5.3 or Debian and some others, no openSUSE).

• Upload doesn't work? Do a loop-back test.• There's absolutely NO excuse for not having an ISP!• Your AVR needs a brain surgery? Use the online FUSE calculator.• My projects: RGB LED matrix, RGB LED ring, various ATtiny gadgets...• Microsoft is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is NO!

although i appreciate your idea of having a temporary forum i dont like the idea for several reasons.

1) A second forum would split up this great community, no matter if this one gets better or not, this will be permanent. 2) I dont like providers like proboards. It's as easy as that.

We shouldnt think of temporary solutions that make even heavier problems what we need is a finally a way to talk to our hosts. Is there anyone having mellis Email address? mellis@arduino.cc just returns and to be honest - i have never seen anyone else of the team...

Believe me, Mike, I calculated the odds of this succeeding against the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid[ch8230] and I went ahead

The root problem is that the admins of this forum have proven themselves nearly totally unreliable. That's a serious problem. What really needs to happen is to find someone (several someones preferably) who can better administer this forum. Or try to figure out why the admins/moderators seem to nearly never have anything to do with their own forum.

I hope that things can be resolved without any splits and quickly. Anyway it goes, the forum really could use an overhaul!

Nachtwind: I agree. Any changes disrupt communities. But as it stands, the current resources for arduino.cc are deteriorating. As I understand it, none of the Arduino Team are IT inclined (save maybe David and Tom). And they are rightfully very busy in their regular jobs (just like the rest of us).

The fact is that a lot of people use the forums as a timely resource for finding information about Arduino, and currently, the resources are in disrepair.

I proposed the switch-over to the proboards because of the similarities. And there is a possibility to migrate all posts over to that forum.

Unfortunately, no one can change your mind on preconceptions of using a service provider. All I can say is you better stop using Google then.

Agreed. The best solution is to talk to the Arduino Team. It would be nice to know what their intentions are.